The NY Times Magazine’s False Cover Story exposed by Sol Stern

Gray Lady Down: Former Timesman Sol Stern, now with the Manhattan Institute, demolishes the Times' story on Israel, in an article that should be mandatory reading in journalism schools for how what was once the paper of record can get things so wrong.

Avishai’s new article, however, is supposed to be a fuller account as well as authoritative. Stern writes:

In self-aggrandizing mode, Avishai touts his “exclusive” revelations as themselves constituting a new opportunity for peace—particularly, he pointedly adds, if President Obama now steps into the breach, picks up where the Israelis and Palestinians left off more than two years ago, and with the aid of the international community pushes through a deal that Israel has no choice but to accept. Otherwise, Avishai quotes a frustrated Abbas as saying, “If nothing happens, I will take a very, very painful decision. Don’t ask me about it.”

Stern continues to write that the details about the Olmert offer to Abbas in September 2008 are actually old news, having appeared elsewhere in major newspapers and magazines three times earlier. Stern himself conducted one of the interviews with Olmert, who told him that Abbas had broken a promise to return for further discussions, and that he had never heard from him since. He continues to write:

Thus, contrary to the Times’ assertion that Olmert has revealed exclusive new information to Avishai, it is abundantly clear that the former Israeli prime minister, widely despised at home and desperate to remain relevant, started blabbing about his negotiations with Abbas over a year and a half ago to anybody who would listen.

I guess that to the NYT’s editors, until the same story is in their paper, it is not new and is not news. But as Stern points out, the other problems are the falsehoods in Avishai’s article. Here is the most important one:

The most significant concerns Avishai’s effort to create a plausible cover story absolving Abbas of responsibility for walking away from yet another ostensibly golden opportunity to win a Palestinian state—just as Yasir Arafat, Abbas’s predecessor, walked away from Bill Clinton’s offer of a state at the 2000 Camp David talks, and at a similar moment when the two sides were supposedly within an inch of an agreement. Without any qualification, Avishai simply accepts at face value Abbas’s transparently self-serving claim that the reasons the negotiation with Olmert didn’t continue after September 2008 were the start of the Gaza war and his good friend Olmert’s preoccupation with his legal troubles. In other words, it was Israel’s fault.

The truth is, as Stern shows, that this is “pure hokum.” The Gaza war was not on Israel’s horizon until three months after the final Olmert-Abbas meeting. Moreover, Olmert’s legal problems would have made Olmert more willing, not less, to bolster his reputation and credibility by producing a lasting peace agreement with the Palestinians. The real reason the negotiations failed is simple. Stern nails it: “In actuality, there is only one plausible reason for Abbas’s failure to return to discuss the issue of borders. It is that the PA president could not and cannot ever allow himself to announce to the Palestinian refugees and their myriad descendants that their 60-year-old dream of returning to their homes in Israel is over.”

Stern is referring to the so-called “right of return,” which no Palestinian negotiator has ever been willing to abandon nor tell his constituency that it will not happen. When I spoke with Saeb Erekat three years ago , the man who has just resigned as chief negotiator for the PA after holding the position for decades, he said that peace would be simple to achieve. He then firmly declared that he and any other Palestinian would never compromise on the “right of return.”

Finally, Stern notes that Olmert has now changed what he tells reporters from what he told them a year earlier. In saying that they were really close to an agreement, Olmert, Stern writes, is making a claim that “is completely contrary to his statement to me in 2009 that he was dismayed by Abbas’s decision to break off negotiations and go silent—an obvious sign that Abbas was nowhere near close to a deal, let alone very close.” Whom do you trust, Olmert to journalists soon after the negotiations ended, or Olmert today, who needs to tell a different version to get noticed and to seem relevant?

Stern concludes:

Now the Times has made up for the lack by letting Abbas lay the blame on Israel’s present government, thus tacitly endorsing the paper’s own spin on the peace process. It is often said that truth is the first casualty of war. Delusions of “peace,” it seems, can have a similarly debilitating effect on political leaders, the journalists who write about them, and the editors of influential newspapers.

In any other time, responsible editors would have spiked Avishai’s article. If they ran it, major magazines would run a dissection of it such as the one Stern has written. Clearly, the magazine ran an article that reaffirms the paper’s editorial views, thus further erasing the difference between objective reporting and the editorial division of the paper. Don’t hold your breath for the Columbia Journalism Review to cover this. Send Sol Stern’s article around, and let’s use the internet to embarrass the New York Times and to let its readers learn the truth.

I recently watched a NYT delivery man pull up in front of me, open the back door of his station wagon, grab papers from his stack, and leave the door open as he made deliveries to various stores and cafes in the block. He clearly had no fear of anyone stealing the papers.

The truth is the NYTimes is irrelevant. Like an old woman who thinks she can still cash in on her long faded looks, paints her face, and draws nothing but pity from onlookers. Dimwits like Avishai, Friedman and the like do not have the intellectual honesty to admit their ” land for peace ” thesis has been proven false. They hang on, bleating, trying to prove they have something to say long after the cows have left the barn. We build and battle and raise our children while the liberals wallow in deviant sex and sow the seeds of their own destruction. So narrow minded and full of self importance they are that that they can’t see G-ds handwriting on the wall.

I usually gauge a news organization based upon how they handle the topics where I have additional knowledge and/or background information. The New York Times continues to fail miserably. Ever since the Jayson Blair scandal, I have been suspicious. And with each passing year, my suspicions grow deeper.

These days I do not regard the newspaper as a credible, independent source. I may still read an article here or there but my skeptic meter remains pegged on maximum for anything they assert.

I wonder why we are not being honest with ourselves re Israel. It is currently on a precipice and it’s security has never been more threatened except at it’s founding. To it’s North is Lebanon, controlled by Hezbollah, on it’s territory in it’s middle is the West Bank occupied by its enemies, and to its south in the Gaza strip.

Clearly the formation of any Palestinian state would be a catastrophe. The Radical left has been pushing for this for years. Their dream, thankfully frustrated in the past has, to now, practically evaded them. The left has never been closer, and Israel has never been, potentially, more encircled by its worst enemies.

I wonder if the recent polls showing that 80% of Egyptians want an end to the Camp David plans, is an inherent sign of anti-Israeli sentiment, or – I think more likely – anti-Palestinian sentiment. After all, if a new Palestine state, aka an new embolden Palestine state, borders Israel, also borders Egypt.

With a bit of aggression and cojones, Israel should do the following, or at least work on setting it in motion

1. Abrogate Camp David accords
2. Announce an end to negotiations with Palestinians
3. Work with Egypt, Jordan and Syria (who don’t want the Palestinians either and who are threatened by the left/socialist/Islamic movements) to shatter the Palestinians and scatter them to the winds, take back Gaza Strip and West Bank, defeat the Iranian government, throw Hezbollah out of Lebanon and either absorb the territories thus vacated or arrange something with their allies in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Or establish a free Lebanon and a free Iran.

“I wonder why we are not being honest with ourselves re Israel. It is currently on a precipice and it’s security has never been more threatened except at it’s founding. To it’s North is Lebanon, controlled by Hezbollah, on it’s territory in it’s middle is the West Bank occupied by its enemies,” …

Should be its. “It’s,” with an apostrophe, denotes a contraction of “it is.”

I’ve argued for years that the Palestinians long ago painted themselves into a corner, from which they cannot possibly extricate themselves without help. They have made terror and unreasonable demands their only tactic for the Palestinian state they say they want. If a Palestinian leader were ever to realize that renouncing violence (and meaning it!) would get him that state in record time, the leader would be denounced as a traitor and a collaborator, and a new hard-line leader would take his place.

In short, peace is not possible with the Palestinians as they are today. I heartily wish it were otherwise.

One day, the Palestinians will realize that their best treatment, by far, has been by Israel. Nobody — not the Jordanians, nor the Lebanese, nor the Egyptians, nor the Syrians, nor anyone else in the Middle East who claims to care about them — has treated the Palestinians as well as Israel has. (Does that make Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians beyond reproach? Of course not. It does, however, put the Palestinians in the position of repeatedly trying to bite the Israeli hand that feeds them.) Contrariwise, one day the Palestinians will realize that the worst enemy in their short history was Yasser Arafat, the man who taught them to raise their children to be human bombs.

I do not expect that day to come any time soon… nor do I see any good ways to get there from here.

And unfortunately, the Palestinians have offered Israel NOTHING that is anywhere near as good as the status quo, bad as that is. (This article does a good job of explaining why that is.) So the status quo will continue. This will be true no matter how many American Presidents think they have an original approach to the problem, and no matter who the Nobel Committee chooses to honor for doing nothing to advance the cause of peace.

Figuring out the Times’ stance on Israel has been easy for the past 34 years, and it’s true for many others on the American left. To them, Israel lost its soul in 1977 when Labor’s 29-year period of running the nation ended and Likud and Begin took over. It was the socialist domestic policies of Labor that endeared it and Israel to the Times and to other liberals in America. To them, Likud is the Republican Party and Netanyahu might as well be George W. Bush.

So when Likud leads the coalition running Israel, it might as well be Texas, Kansas or Utah to the people across from the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue. Without a government supporting liberal domestic policies and the American left’s Middle East foreign policy beliefs, the Times sees no reason to support Israel (and the same dynamic led to the Clinton White House sanctioning James Carvelle to go to Israel in 1999 to run Ehud Barak’s campaign, so that Israel would have a more liberal government and Clinton a more plyant leader to agree to a treat with Arafat and win Clinton the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama’s already got one of those, but if the Israelis would just elect a leader who would give in to Hamas and add some more government control to the economy, the Times would love them as they did a generation ago).

I suppose there’s still value in exposing the Times’s duplicity and bias, but I for one have given up the tedious task. Better to ignore them or simply show disdain, then wait patiently for the creaky old battle axe to slip below the waves.

Also check out Rubin Reports from a few weeks ago that discusses the false accusations regarding the Olmert talks and Professor Barry Rubin’s periodic analyses of various NY Times articles and reporters who fail to meet elementary standards of journalism or demonstrate no comprehension of the Middle East.

The NYT has no real cred left in Middle East diplomacy, not even with Ehud Barak or the Israeli left. Sheridan’s questions in the penultimate para are germane—the Palestinians are either too screwed up ['we forgot we go to Amman today'] or simply burdened with mala fides.

Barry Rubin is always good at following up on the silly journalistic unforced errors committed by pseudo-journalists on the left [tautological & redundant, I know].

Stern: “Avishai simply accepts at face value Abbas’s transparently self-serving claim that the reasons the negotiation with Olmert didn’t continue after September 2008 were the start of the Gaza war and his good friend Olmert’s preoccupation with his legal troubles. In other words, it was Israel’s fault.”
Radosh: ‘The truth is, as Stern shows, that this is “pure hokum.” The Gaza war was not on Israel’s horizon until three months after the final Olmert-Abbas meeting.’

Avishai clearly states that “the Gaza border was heating up” during the final meeting between Olmert and Abbas, and that “negotiations were not formally suspended until January, after Israel attacked in Gaza.”

The NYTimes has to be exposed over and over until every serious person interested in the news understands that they are not credible.
The Times has a long sordid record going back decades, but at least years ago there were some bright spots to offset the rest, people like Safire and AM Rosenthal. Today, there is no one with integrity there. Just Thomas Friedman who thinks the world sits in suspended animation awaiting his unmatchable prescient thoughts and Bronner and Kristof who carry water for their boss’s political agenda.

For the NYT it’s not about a new story but new history – the long tested tool and weapon of the left. This is nothing but revisionism happening in front of our eyes.
Soon enough the left and “Palestinians” will start regurgitating this story until some people will believe that this is the truth in which point Obama will make a speech at some country (hostile to Israel, of course) and put the blame squarely on Israel’s shoulders. To the NYT that will be mission accomplished.

I have great admiration for the jews who defend the small State of Israel, their ancient land. And I despise the apostates who defiled it, lying and twisting the truth and using the NYT to spread them.

to solve the israeli palestinian conflict the israeli nation established in 1948 will have to become an israeli republic with a written constitution this plus the recognition that the ancient jewish religion is not applicable thus an isolated israel cannot and will never function in the region as the israeli mosad chief once said to a deaf israeli crowd if we do not intergrate into the region this experiment is useless am lo levadad ishkon a nation can not dwell a lone is the solution mr stern who used to be a friend of mine thinks that the political solution is am levadad ishkon a nation stands alone both stern and avishai who knew my mentor peter bergson know well that his idea of an israeli republic goes back to the holocaust days the fact that israel did not write a constitution is only hurting itself